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Tuesday, April 3, 2018

A third Trump election conspiracy theory dies.

In the middle of March, The Guardian, a British lefty
tabloid, rolled out a fake scandal that has dominated the media. Its
original article claimed that Christopher Wylie, a "whistleblower", had
revealed how Cambridge Analytica, the company he had worked for, had
helped Trump win by illegitimately harvesting large amounts of Facebook
data and then exploiting it to target users.

The story has since fallen apart in every conceivable way that a story is capable of falling apart.

Obama’s people had also harvested data from Facebook friends. "We
ingested the entire U.S. social graph," his media analytics guru had boasted. But so had everyone else. A platform operations manager at Facebook estimated that hundreds of thousands of developers had gotten access to friend data.

So much for The Guardian’s claim that, "information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale".

Free online services are part of a data marketplace. That’s the real
business that Facebook is in. The story only blew up because it offered
another conspiratorial explanation for President Trump’s victory.

Except it didn’t.

The Trump campaign had only used
Cambridge Analytica's data during the primaries before switching to RNC
data during the election. The fake news scandal had nothing to do with
the actual election.

But that didn’t stopMother Jones
from running a story headlined, "Here (Was Once) a Photo of Cambridge
Analytica’s CEO With the Russian Ambassador to the UK". The nebulous
connections between the Trump campaign, Russia and Facebook data had
become another red dot on the strange global map of lefty conspiracy
theories struggling to explain President Trump’s victory.

The story just kept coming apart.

The Guardian had glamorized Wylie as a courageous whistleblower in numerous stories. The pink-haired “gay Canadian vegan” is described as agonizing over his role. He told British lawmakers,
“Donald Trump makes it click in your head that this actually has a much
wider impact. I don't think that military-style information operations
is conducive for any democratic process.”

Except the “whistleblower’s” own company and had been pitching Trump’s future campaign manager back when Cambridge Analytica had been working with Ted Cruz.

The Guardian’s
whistleblower had been discredited. Its extended series of stories had
never delivered on their claim that there was anything extraordinary
about the data collection or illegitimate about either Trump’s victory
or Brexit: a special target of the British lefty tabloid. The primary
and secondary stories had casually conflated the two, breathlessly
reporting on the data collection tactics and leaving it to readers to
assume that there was also something shocking or illegitimate in how the
data was used.

But that hasn’t dissuaded the media from its
obsessive coverage of another scandal of its own invention. And most of
its previous Facebook conspiracy theories about Trump’s win were even
shoddier.

The original post-election Facebook conspiracy
theories blamed “fake news” sites. Dubious metrics were assembled
claiming that fake news stories outperformed mainstream media articles.
The numbers behind the metrics turned out to be bad,
but that didn’t matter. The purge of dissenting views from social
media was underway. And conservative sites continue to be banned and
shadowbanned over it.

Then there was the even more dubious
claim that Russian Facebook ads had rigged the election. Again,
ridiculous metrics were assembled which asserted that the ads had
reached 126 million Americans. Even though the Russians had spent fairly
little relative to either campaign and all of the dark money in the
race. And the fact was that the majority of the ad engagement had actually happened after the election.

When Facebook's VP of Ad Product pointed this out, the media forced him to apologize for challenging its conspiracy theory. Again, bad numbers and media hysteria kept the conspiracy theory going.

This latest Facebook conspiracy theory seeks to address the problem
with the two previous conspiracy theories. How could fake news sites and
Russian ads be more effective than the Clinton campaign? The answer was
filled in with gibberish about “psychological warfare tools”. Voters
hadn’t just been tricked. They had been brainwashed into voting Trump
with “sophisticated psychological and political profiles.”

Except we’re still talking about ads here.

If being
subjected to constant brainwashing, lies, spin and manipulation by
trained experts could rig an election, every media outlet in American
that doesn’t start with an F would have made Hillary president.

Even assuming that all the allegations made about the data collection
were true (and there’s no reason to assume that), that has no bearing
whatsoever on the legitimacy of either election or referendum.
Facebook’s data privacy has nothing to do with Americans picking Trump
and Brits choosing Brexit.

The various Facebook conspiracy
theories, whether they involve Russian trolls, alleged fake news or this
psychographic profiling, have one thing in common. They all seek to
deny the agency of the voters.

A popular theme in British
lefty tabloids after Brexit was profiling individuals who had voted
Leave and now claimed to have been fooled into voting incorrectly. The
latest Facebook fake news scandal hits all the same notes. Trump and
Brexit voters didn’t really legitimately vote. Instead they were
brainwashed by some sort of big data psychological weapon that persuaded
the deplorables to do the wrong thing.

Like most conspiracy theories, it’s silly. But it’s also deeply dangerous.

When political elites start convincing themselves that democracy
doesn’t work because they didn’t get the results they wanted, that’s
much scarier than anything in Facebook’s data collection policies.

The political elites on both sides of the ocean have been talking
themselves into the idea that free referendums and elections are a bad
idea because the ordinary person is too easily manipulated.

Behind the rush to lock down Facebook, purge “fake news” from social
media and push “fact checks” everywhere is a deep distrust of the
individual. The utopian idealism of the elites conceals the cynical
conviction that democracy is a hoax and most people are sheep who will
do whatever they’re told.

That’s why the news media and the entertainment industry constantly tell us what to think.
All the assorted Facebook conspiracy theories converge around the
paranoid notion that the only reason the elites badly lost with Trump
and Brexit is that someone else did a better job of brainwashing their
voters. The conspiracy theories range from Macedonian fake news sites to
Russian trolls to a British data analytics company, but they all agree
that there was an informational coup against their propaganda.

Projecting the source of the informational coup outward cloaks the
lefty crackdowns in the garb of national security instead of domestic
repression. Fighting foreign election interference sounds better than
censoring the political opposition. Even if most dictatorships use the
former to justify the latter.

Fake statistics and involved
technical explanations give the conspiracy theories an air of
credibility. But underneath them is the conviction that the only way to
protect democracy, a frequent election conspiracy talking point, is to
rig it by denying the voters their choice of information sources.

No one who thinks that voters can’t be trusted to make their own
decisions believes in democracy. They only see the illusion of democracy
as a useful tool for consensus building. The real thing frightens them.

The conspiracy theories fall apart when you examine them. Dig into the
numbers and they don’t hold up. And none of them prove their central
premise that the 2016 election was illegitimate. Like the Mueller
investigation and most conspiracy theories, they go to all sorts of
interesting places. But they never actually make the trip from A to B.
Instead they’d like to tell you about Russian trolls, Canadian gay
vegans, British intelligence agents, Macedonian websites, Japanese
servers and everything else.

They cast doubt, introduce
elaborate theories and write longread reports that do everything but
prove that the election was rigged, its results were illegitimate and
that Americans really wanted Hillary.

Instead they make the
case for censoring the internet and distrusting the voters. The
conspiracy theory is always the conspiracy. And behind these conspiracy
theories is a conspiracy against democracy.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269762/whats-behind-trump-facebook-election-conspiracy-daniel-greenfield Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.